A reason for the dearth of new posts lately: I looked into some opportunities to become a contributor to other sites and discovered they wanted writing samples submitted to be completed unpublished – not even published on the applicant’s own blog. So some of my most recent literary or pop-culture commentary had to be “saved” for that.

Here’s hoping the book-and-TV posts that are already up generate more discussion…

I don’t intend, for the most part, to make this a “political” blog in the sense of using it to try to tell you which parties, candidates, or positions to support.

But, with the Presidential election underway in the U.S., I feel strongly about people’s right to know that the Democrats and Republicans are not the only parties running candidates (in most states – it varies by state.)

Click here to read about other parties running Presidential candidates as well as who besides the Democrat and Republican is running for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio.

Partial Spoilers for The Monogram Murders, by Sophie Hannah

In 2014, Agatha Christie’s estate granted Sophie Hannah permission to use Christie’s detective, Hercule Poirot, in a new original novel. The Monogram Murders.

Hercule Poirot (the Belgian refugee detective originally created by Christie) hopes for a respite when he stays at a London hotel (even though he’s close to his home), but he is soon drawn into a new case when a young woman name Jennie arrives and makes a cryptic prediction of her own murder, followed by the even more cryptic statement “Let no one open their mouths.” Soon bodies turn up at a different hotel with monogrammed cufflinks – which have a connection to a long-ago tragedy – in their mouths.